Choosing Sides
by Athena Alexandria
Summary: Post I Ain't A Judas. "I'm asking you once and for all, are you one of us, or are you one of them? Because all this running back and forth is only going get you killed." Rick convinces Andrea to take a stand in the coming war. Companion piece to Scars.


_For those of you who are familiar with my other Rick/Andrea fics, this works as a companion piece to 'Scars', although each can be read on its own. Rated T for language and adult themes._

* * *

CHOOSING SIDES

Hershel's expression was grave when he emerged from Andrea's cell.

"How is she?" Rick asked, intercepting him from his post by the door, where he had been waiting for the old man to finish patching her up. "She conscious yet?"

He was the one had who opened the gate for her, watching in horror as she crumpled into the dirt the second it was locked behind her. In that moment, he was sure that she must be dying. There was so much blood: on her face, her neck, her clothes… It wasn't until he started to wipe it away that he realised it was coming from a deep gash on her cheek and not somewhere more fatal.

He was alone on watch at the time, so he gathered her up in his arms and ran with her into the prison, past the terrified faces of their friends, into the cellblock, where Hershel took over.

"I gave her some painkillers so she'll be groggy for a while, but she's awake," Hershel told him, wiping his hands on a handkerchief that was already crimson with her blood. "Fortunately it looks a lot worse than it is. She's going to have a nasty scar – there's nothing I can do about that – but the wound itself is fairly superficial. It should heal up in a week or two."

Rick was almost afraid to voice the question that had been circling his mind ever since he brought her into the prison, but he had to be sure of what they were dealing with. "Could she…? Is she infected?"

She had arrived with a pack of frenzied walkers snapping at her heels and no weapons; he still wasn't convinced that she could have travelled all the way from Woodbury on foot without getting bitten, especially while she was losing so much blood. The fact that they hadn't torn her apart was a miracle in itself.

He felt himself relax slightly when Hershel shook his head. The last thing he wanted was to have to put a bullet in her. They'd been through that too many times already.

"The wound looks as though it was made with a knife. I've never known a walker to be that precise. Have you?"

Rick's relief didn't last long. "You're saying someone was trying to kill her?"

"I'm saying this was deliberate," Hershel corrected him.

"What do you mean 'deliberate'?"

"You ever carve a pumpkin for Halloween?"

"Yeah," Rick agreed slowly, not sure he liked where this conversation was headed.

A wave of nausea flooded through him when Hershel nodded, fixing him with a meaningful look.

"Someone cut up her face on purpose?" Of all the senseless things Rick had seen and heard since he woke from his coma – and even before that – this was somehow the worst. "She tell you who?" There was only one man he knew of who was capable of something so barbarically cruel.

"Barely said a word the whole time I was with her. I think she's in shock."

Rick's jaw clenched with involuntary rage. "Probably wondering how her boyfriend could turn on her like that," he retorted bitterly, not sure who he was more upset with: her or himself. He never should have let her go back there. He should have known that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. The man was out of his skull.

"You think the Governor did this?" Hershel asked, though Rick was sure the same thought must have crossed his mind. It wasn't like there were a lot of other reasonable suspects.

"Only one way to find out." Rick patted the old man's shoulder in a silent thank you, walking past him into the cell.

She was curled in the shadows in the corner of her bunk, so that at first, all he could make out of her was the outline of her back; as he moved closer, he saw that most of the left side of her face was covered in crisp white gauze.

She was still except for the steady rise and fall of her chest, her eyes closed, though doped up or not, he doubted that she could have fallen asleep so quickly after the nightmare she had just lived through.

"Hershel says you'll be fine," he told her.

As he suspected, she was still awake. "Fine," she repeated in an ironic tone, wincing as though each syllable was torture. "I look like the Joker."

He tried to think of something reassuring to say, but he didn't want to lie to her when they both knew it was bad.

Instead, he decided to use this as an opening. "You wanna talk about how that happened?" he asked her, dragging a chair up to her bedside.

She was still dressed in the blood-soaked blouse she had arrived in; he made a mental note to ask Carol to find her something else to wear.

"Does it matter?"

Her words caught him off guard. In the time they'd spent apart, he'd forgotten just how stubborn she could be. "Of course it does," he insisted. "How could you even say that?"

She had never been the easiest person for him to read: right now he couldn't tell if her refusal to shed any light on her injury stemmed from a desire to protect the culprit, or if she honestly believed that he didn't care who had hurt her.

"Andrea… Who did this to you?" he tried again, gentler this time. "Was it the Governor?"

Once again she didn't answer, dragging herself into a sitting position, her arms folded defensively over her chest. In the process, she inadvertently lifted her sleeve, exposing a row of dark fingerprint shaped bruises.

"He give you those too?"

She glanced from the bruises back up to him. "That was you," she told him, her stony look souring into a scowl.

"Me?" He thought back to when he carried her in. He had handled her with as much care as he would one of his own children. There was no way he could have done something like that to her.

"You don't remember roughing me up like a common criminal the last time I came to visit?"

He remembered patting her down at the gate, but that was all. It wasn't like he had worked her over for information. "You're exaggerating," he argued, unwilling to believe that his treatment of her had been that aggressive. He wasn't the Governor.

She set her jaw in a show of defiance that reminded him of the first time they met. She had been pissed at him then too. "I got those when you grabbed my arm."

He took hold of her bicep gently, touching his fingertips lightly to each of the marks. She was right: they were a perfect match.

He slid his hand down to her elbow, turning it carefully, his eyes drawn to the long greyish bruise that stood out against the pale skin of her forearm.

"What about this one?"

"That was from you shoving me into a fence. And this—" She took her arm back, rolling up the leg of her olive green cargo pants to show him the ugly scab that was forming on top of another bruise at the base of her kneecap, "—is from you forcing me to my knees in the gravel front of all those people."

Listening to her rattle off the list of injuries – however slight – that she had suffered at his hands, Rick felt a creeping sense of shame. He was so desperate to prevent another attack that he let himself forget how delicate she was. How small and soft. For all her strength and skill at handling herself, she could have been any woman. She could have been his own wife.

In all his years on the force, he had never been the kind of cop who manhandled suspects, preferring that old adage about flies and honey. It was a running joke with the other officers, earning him a reputation as the good cop to Shane's bad one.

Officer Friendly, they had called him. Only he wasn't so friendly anymore.

"I'm sorry, Andrea," he told her sincerely. "I had to be sure we could trust you."

She acknowledged this with a tiny nod, but her expression remained cool. "Did you get what you needed?"

"That depends."

"On what?" she asked warily.

"On whose side you're on."

She turned away from him in disgust. "Sides," she repeated, a note of incredulity in her voice. "Like this is all some big game of Cowboys and Indians. It's bullshit."

"That bullshit almost got you killed," he reminded her.

While the wound itself wasn't designed to be lethal, there was no doubt in his mind that the Governor wanted her dead or else he wouldn't have thrown her out on the street without so much as a pocket knife.

She shifted onto her side with her back to him, closing her eyes again. "At this point I'm not even sure that would be such a bad thing."

Rick squeezed his own eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. He really thought they were past that. "Is that why you went back there? To him?" he couldn't resist asking her. "Because you still have some insane death wish?"

"I'm tired, Rick," she said, so softly that he almost didn't hear her, and he thought that was the end of the conversation until she rolled back over to face him. "I'm a lawyer, not a soldier. I fight with words, not a gun. I don't know how to be what you want me to be – any of you."

"Now _that_ is bullshit," he argued. Next to Michonne, she was the most formidable woman he knew. Hell, she was one of the most formidable people he knew. "Shane told me he saw you take down a half dozen walkers without breaking a sweat while you were still in training. That was nine months ago. I'm willing to bet you've improved since then."

"That was different. Those were walkers."

"Those were _targets_," he insisted, remembering what his firearms instructor had taught him during his police training. "You have to stop thinking of the Governor's men as people and start thinking of them that way."

So far he had a couple of strong fighters like Daryl and Michonne on the ground if anyone made it past the fences; what he really needed was someone that he could station up in the guard tower to protect the perimeter, and from what he had seen, she was the only one up to the task.

"The others are good, but none of them are as good as you. You have a gift, Andrea – one that could help us win this. You wanna do something? Then stay. Pick up a gun and help us defend this place. _That_ is how you save us."

Tears sprang to her eyes, and he knew that he was pushing too hard, but it was too important to let go. He couldn't have her sitting on the sidelines when they were already outnumbered almost ten to one.

"I'm not a killer, Rick," she insisted, silently pleading with him not to put her in that position.

Neither was I, he thought, until someone threatened my life, my family. Neither was Maggie, or Michonne.

What he said was, "You're a survivor, and these days that amounts to the same thing. I know I'm asking a lot. I'm not gonna deny it – killing another human being, it weighs on you. Chips away a little piece of your soul." The look on his best friend's face as he plunged a knife into his heart would haunt him until the day that he died. "But clean hands aren't a luxury we have anymore. Not if we want to live. And I know you do, because you've made it this far."

She sat up, drawing her knees to her chest. "What happened to the Rick Grimes who believed that we didn't have to lose our humanity?" she asked, regarding him with a mixture of sadness and pity.

He could barely even remember saying that now. He tried to reconcile her image of him with the man he had become, but the truth was, that version of himself had died back on the farm with Shane when he chose survival over morality.

"I was naïve," he told her. "We all were, and we paid for that in blood. Dale… T-Dog… Lori… Is it really worth your life too?"

He reached across the space between them, his fingers grazing the bandage on her cheek. "Someone did that to you. I don't know if it was the Governor or one of his goons – you're right, it doesn't matter. What does matter is what you're gonna do about it. Now I'm asking you once and for all, are you one of us or are you one of them? Because all this running back and forth is only going get you killed."

She averted her gaze, staring down at her boots, and for a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Finally, she lifted her head resolutely to meet his eyes and said, "I'm one of you, Rick. This group is my family – you have to know that. All those months I was on the road with Michonne, I never stopped looking, never stopped hoping that I would find you again. Then when I saw Daryl, it was like my prayers had been answered."

It shamed him now to admit that while she was searching for a way to reconnect with the group, he was trying his hardest to forget her, and how effortlessly he had written her off. It was easier to tell himself that she was dead than to acknowledge the possibility that he had willingly left her behind.

"Does that mean you're staying?" he asked her. "For good this time?"

"I will," she agreed, "on two conditions."

He tried not to appear too eager, even though he knew he would more than likely give her whatever she wanted if it meant gaining access to her considerable talents. "I'm listening."

Number one was exactly what he had come to expect:

"I'll do what I can to help you protect the prison, but you have to leave Woodbury alone."

That was fine. He had no grievance with the rest of them. He only wanted the Governor.

"Fair enough. And the second?"

Her blue eyes narrowed, becoming cold, her expression hardening into a mask of pure hatred. "When the time comes, you have to let me take care of Philip."

He didn't have to ask her why. He doubted she would tell him if he did.

"I think I can live with that."


End file.
